Thursday, October 23, 2014

Window on Eurasia: If Moscow Returned Crimea to Ukraine, What Else Might It Have to Give Back – and to Whom?

Paul
Goble

Staunton, October 23 – In the course
of a discussion of why he argues Moscow will have to reverse the Anschluss of
Crimea at the end of Russia’s war with Ukraine, Andrey Illarionov says that the
Russian government could lose many other disputed territories to neighboring
countries.

The Russian commentator lists the following
territories which Russia might lose in that event: a portion of Pskov oblast to
Latvia, a portion of Leningrad oblast to Estonia, parts of Karelia and
Leningrad oblast to Finland, Smolensk and Bryansk oblasts to Belarus, Voronezh and
Rostov oblasts and Krasnodar kray to Ukraine, a significant portion of Western
Siberia to Kazakhstan, “not less than 1.5 million square kilometers of Siberia
and the Far East to China, and the Kurile islands and Sakhalin to Japan (inforesist.org/posle-vojny-rossii-pridetsya-vernut-ukraine-ne-tolko-krym-illarionov/).

And that list only concerns transfers of territory from the existing Russian Federation to internationally recognized states around its borders and not the question of the ceding of what Moscow now claims as immemorially part of Russia to states from which it seized land in the past by destroying and absorbing them within its borders.

On
the one hand, these lists underscore both how tendentious many of the
borders established in Soviet times are given that they were drawn and imposed
by Moscow and how many of these remain matters of dispute. In short, they show that it is not a question
of whether there will be more “Crimeas” in the future but how many of them
there have been already.

But on
the other hand and far more fatefully, they highlight something else: the
unlikelihood that Moscow will ever agree except under duress to reverse its
violation of international law in the case of Crimea because of fears among
Russians that doing so would open the floodgates to a process that would lead
to the dismemberment of their country.